watching language

[by joel]

so, for a little while now i’ve been mumbling things about wanting to organise some sort of performance night thing. the basic desire behind this is that i want to do some experimental things as part of my thesis, and for that to happen, i’ll need to organise something soonish, since it’s august already. now, i don’t know how all of this should come about. one of the aspects that i’m getting really into in my thesis reading is ideas around thought and language. rather than being interested specifically in texts as detached and finite literary objects, i’m interested in them as traces of a movement toward language. which is kind of where my interest in poetic and experimental forms is coming from, as forms that (sometimes) refuse to obscure this mobile – both spatially and temporally – aspect of the text. one of my problems with most forms of translation is that it too conceals the movement toward language in favour of accurately rendering the map of that movement (the text). it’s like seeing a line drawn in sand, and instead of walking along that line, tracing your finger along the groove of it, you step back and take a photo of it. so i’m interested in the processes by which language comes to take form. and i’m interested in making those processes visible, audible, tangible, etc.

so the idea is to organise a night(s) of performances, involving anyone who is interested in this idea. the parameters would and should be pretty broad, i think. how i would tentatively phrase it, is that any piece which comes about with this idea of making visible the movement toward language, or any piece which relates well to the idea, would be welcome in this environment. to give you an idea, my plan is to do some experimental live translations, reading spanish-on-the-page texts out in english, thus demanding a real-time path to language, hurried and improvised. i would also like to perhaps collaborate with (exploit might be a better word) dismithive to have my own readings of spanish poems looped back to me for translation, possibly altering the speed to first facilitate and then diffcultate (should be a verb) the process. the idea being that the translations themselves aren’t so much the point, rather the performance of finding language.

i think this stuff isn’t altogether irrelevant for the work that a lot of people in the group are either doing at the moment or at least interested in. i immediately think of asti’s sound translations of under milkwood as being something that could definitely fit in under this banner of watching language (though i know you want to do something quite specific with that piece, so maybe this won’t be the occasion). also, things like talk pieces would be apposite, as they foreground the moment of the formation of language over ideal aesthetic forms. and there’s no reason why a non-linguistic response to language or a linguistic response to non-language couldn’t be in there. or watching cocks being drawn repeatedly on a wall (at what point do they become signs in a language we can read and understand?). but the possibilities are pretty endless, as long as that idea of watching language, visiblising the movement and formulation of it, are present.

so if anyone is interested, or confused, or annoyed, please comment.